Alchemy

Items can be marked with alchemy tags to indicate that you can use the brew action to combine them together into magical elixirs.

Brew

With a few hours of downtime and the appropriate tools, you may combine 1-3 materials with alchemy tags to create a potion or poison with an effect improvised based on their tags.

Brewing is just like crafting -- making progress (on something big). Test your alchemical knowledge to craft the potion or poison against the potion's progress bar, which your GM will set based on how powerful the created potion or poison is. Then, you produce as many doses as progress bars you can fill with your roll.

You can create potions and poisons by only partially filling a progress bar as well. If you've filled it at least half way you can choose to complete the potion, but give it the unstable tag and let your GM know. When you use it, tell your GM that it's tagged with unstable-- they may say it has unexpected side effects.

Alchemy tags

Alchemy tags, just like other tags, can be applied to things when they are relevant. You can spend some downtime to research alchemy tags of ingredients that don't obviously have alchemy tags.

In general, alchemy tags represent the properties that can be derived from the object. They can be as literal as tagging some wool as fluffy, or as poetic as tagging cold iron with lunafaction. Here are a list of a few alchemy tags to get you started:

• A classical element (fire, earth, water, air)
• Life
• Death
• Comfort
• Ethereal
• Magical
• Social
• Contention
• Attraction
• Relaxation

and of course

• Unstable

Alchemy in practice

Alchemy is most powerful in that it gives the GM a prompt to work with.

An alchemist picks some flowers in a somber, quiet forest -- Wilting Princesses, tagged with ethereal and death and combine them with some Phoenix Tears, tagged with fire and rebirth.

The GM asks if they have a desired result in mind, but the alchemist does not-- they simply want to combine the ingredients and see what they make.

Drawing on the tags, the GM decides that this combination can produce a Potion of Flickering Memorial, a potion that briefly allows the drinker to see, and wordlessly commune, with an image of a close departed friend in the smoke above a fire.

Additionally, alchemy can be used to make recipes more flexible. Let's revisit this example of a crafting project.

Recipe: Sleep Poison

Requires your alchemists kit and a specific variety of mushrooms found in warm, damp caves.

Progress Bar: 20/20

Instead of requiring a "specific variety of mushrooms" found in a specific location, we could make use of the alchemy system like so:

Recipe: Sleep Poison

Ingredients: 1 relaxation and 1 contention

Progress Bar: 20/20